Monty Don, the television gardening presenter, always comes across on screen as irrepressibly cheerful and enthusiastic, but this is a misleading impression. In fact, he gets black moods. ‘It’s no secret that for many years I’ve suffered from depression,’ he said last week at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. He had tried Prozac and cognitive behavioural
I’ve been thinking about poor Shami Chakrabarti and the drubbing she’s suffered since it was revealed she’s sending her son to Dulwich College. She joins a long line of Labour hypocrites who are opposed to grammar schools but choose to send their own children to selective schools. The list includes Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony
In olden days, before the internet arrived, shopping was quite simple. You’d go into a shop and buy something, and that was it. If you liked the shop, if it sold things you wanted to buy at a fair price, and if the shopkeeper was efficient and agreeable, you might return. But otherwise you wouldn’t.
I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the mood is buoyant, to put it mildly. Everyone seems delighted with the new captain and completely unfazed by the perilous waters ahead. If anyone is sad about the demise of David Cameron and some of his key lieutenants they’re not letting on. It’s
I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar? She thought it might, but suggested
Every threatened species of wildlife can count on the friendship of a member of the British royal family. There are few causes that royals can espouse without risking political controversy, but wildlife conservation is seen as one. This may be why they are ready to speak out for any newt, butterfly, or other creature facing
There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because
The publication of private emails by Colin Powell has spread panic in Washington. Now nobody feels safe. Some prominent people have even deleted their entire email accounts, fearing that their private messages will be hacked and revealed to the world. It hasn’t been the leaking of official secrets of the kind associated with WikiLeaks and
Forgive me if I don’t get too worked up about Momentum Kids. For those who haven’t been following Labour’s internal politics too closely, Momentum is a Trotskyist faction within the party that was instrumental in getting Jeremy Corbyn elected last year and, barring an upset, re-elected this weekend. Momentum claims the main purpose of its
‘It is highly unlikely the Prime Minister has read the book,’ my father harrumphed, commenting on the appropriation of the word ‘meritocracy’, which he invented to describe a dystopian society of the future in The Rise of the Meritocracy. That comment appeared in a 2001 article for the Guardian and the Prime Minister in question
It’s been a very patriotic weekend, ablaze with Union flags. In London there was the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and in South Northamptonshire there was the ninth annual ‘Village at War’ festival at Stoke Bruerne on the Grand Union Canal. I watched the first event on television but attended
Say what you like about the St Leger — and I like it a lot — Doncaster’s finale to the British Classics rarely fails to provide a story. In 2012 it was Camelot’s narrow failure to become the first Triple Crown winner of the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby and the Leger since Nijinsky in 1970.
There is no cherished assumption that now goes unchallenged. The latest one is that country air is good for you. Ronald Reagan was much mocked when he said in 1981 that ‘trees cause more pollution than automobiles do’, but scientists later surprised everyone by saying that he was at least partially right. And now it
What’s wrong with you?’ That was the question an American broadcaster asked Anthony Weiner when his New York City mayoral campaign went up in flames in 2013. Weiner, the subject of a feature-length documentary released earlier this year, had just become embroiled in a second sex scandal, the first having derailed his political career in
Americans want a president with the steadiest possible finger on the nuclear button, which is why they worry about the state of health of their presidential candidates, and why nowadays candidates often try to quash doubts about their health by releasing their medical records. Sometimes they overdo it, as in the case of Senator John
Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or
E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done
The 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this month, was living support of the claim that wealth doesn’t make you happy. He was as rich as can be, but said he wished he hadn’t been. The dukedom, and the billions of pounds it brought with it, came to him unexpectedly. He had been brought up
The BBC has published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, compiled after consulting academics, cinema curators and critics — and, as you’d expect, it’s almost comically dull. The list contains numerous turgid meditations on the spiritual void at the heart of western civilisation by obscure European ‘auteurs’ and not a
In the four months since I had a brain haemorrhage I have had several tests to find out how my mind has been affected. The first tests were conducted in Siena, where I had been taken to hospital after falling ill on a spring holiday in Tuscany. A nice Italian lady showed up with bundles
